WHY ARE THEY STILL MISSING?

Officer John Bolduc walks through a wooded area in Webster, Mass., that was cleared of underbrush last fall so investigators could use ground-penetrating radar in an attempt to locate the body of Andrew Amato. The boy disappeared in 1978; police searched this field last year on a tip that the body might be there. No body was found.

A state-by-state and town-by-town breakdown of abducted children in New England is available on The Courant's website: www.ctnow.com When Albert Paskell heard recently that police were backtracking to find victims of Nathaniel Bar-Jonah, a Montana child molester who prowled eastern Massachusetts and Connecticut in the 1970s, he started wondering.

Did the detectives know about his girlfriend's 8-year-old son, Leigh Savoie, who disappeared in 1972 while shining shoes in Revere, Mass.? Paskell made some calls.

What he discovered left him stunned: No one, it seemed, knew about Leigh.

Not the Revere police, who told Paskell the case was closed and the files couldn't be found. Not the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the official clearinghouse for unsolved abduction cases like Leigh's.

And not the police in Webster, Mass., which had become ground zero in a nationwide search for victims of Bar-Jonah, its former resident.

There simply was no record of Leigh's case that could have alerted detectives to possible similarities to Bar-Jonah's crimes.

For parents of the approximately 100 abducted children who are killed or disappear each year in the United States, the only consolation may be a belief that the criminal justice system will do everything it can to find out what happened to their little boy or girl. But despite acts of Congress, faces on milk cartons and high-tech investigative tools, young victims continue to fall through cracks.

A Courant review of 59 unsolved child-abduction cases in New England over the last 30 years found that authorities sometimes fail to immediately investigate them, don't share critical information and overlook systems put in place to help solve these rare, yet wrenching crimes. Older cases, in particular, tend to fade into oblivion unless an investigator takes a personal interest in one.

Specifically, the review found that:

Police do not always report child abductions by strangers to the FBI-approved clearinghouse set up to help solve them. Nine of the 59 cases examined have never been reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Reports of missing children, particularly teenage girls, aren't always taken seriously and valuable investigative time is lost. Uninterested police insisted to one distraught mother that her 14-year-old daughter was hanging out at a local mall -- until it turned out she had been dead all along, her body dumped in a nearby state forest.

Police departments in the same states don't share information, and names of potential suspects get lost in old files. Detectives in one small Massachusetts town learned of a potential suspect in an unsolved abduction, only after The Courant discovered the information in state police files that had never been shared with local authorities.

Those findings jibe with a groundbreaking 1997 study of 600 cases nationwide, which found that police generally are ill-equipped to respond to child-abductions. The study, by the Washington State Attorney General, found that detectives sometimes fail to canvass neighborhoods, ask the wrong questions and are too quick to suspect parents, who, statistically, are least likely to have committed the crime.

Experts say the haphazard response to child abductions means that no one knows for sure how many unsolved cases there are. The Courant found 59, dating to 1969, through a review of police records and news archives in all six New England states.

``We still don't know a lot about investigating these cases,'' said Henry Lee, the world-renowned forensic scientist and former commander of the Connecticut State Police.

``We have turf problems between departments and others that don't react quickly enough to these cases,'' Lee said. ``It's a shame, because children are the most innocent and vulnerable group, and they are being preyed upon.''

Poor Reporting

Mayra Cruz, 13, was last seen alive at a school bus stop in her Asylum Hill neighborhood in Hartford on Oct. 8, 1987. A witness saw the seventh-grader getting into a small, yellow car driven by a young man.

Police initially thought she might have left home willingly and classified her as a runaway, claiming at least three people had seen her in Hartford. A month later her lifeless body, clothed in the same outfit as the day she disappeared, turned up in a wooded area of East Windsor. Her skull had been crushed.

Aside from her death going unsolved, Mayra has something else in common with other missing or murdered children, like Matthew Margolies of Greenwich, Melissa Fadden of Lowell, Mass., and Michelle Norris of Central Falls, R.I.

None of them was reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Virginia.

Founded in 1984, the NCMEC is the only federally recognized clearinghouse for information on child abduction cases. In addition to private support, it also receives federal funding and is linked to the FBI's Internet site and the National Crime Information Center, a restricted computer network used by law enforcement agencies.

The NCMEC says it has worked on more than 66,000 cases and helped recover 47,000 children, most of them runaways or victims of parental-abductions.

Investigators say the NCMEC is also useful for pursuing unsolved stranger-abductions, the most terrifying and hard-to-crack cases. The center's computerized records are available to police departments probing similar cases across the country -- a forensic tool that is especially valuable when tracking serial criminals who cross state lines.

For that reason, police departments are encouraged to notify the NCMEC of old cases, as well as new ones. But police are not required to report to the NCMEC, or avail themselves of its resources, and although many departments do, some still do not.

As a result, say NCMEC officials, the center's records are incomplete and some cases go unsolved.

``We don't always have every missing child case in the country,'' said Ben Ermini, executive director of NCMEC. ``We're [getting] better at communicating with each other, but there are still agencies that will just say, `We don't want your help.'''

In an effort to determine how many stranger-abductions have gone unreported to the NCEMC, The Courant examined public records of unsolved cases available through state government Internet sites around the country. Most state law enforcement agencies post some missing-person cases on their own -- often hard-to-find -- Internet sites.

The Courant's review found 20 cases that had never been reported to the NCMEC, including the nine in New England.

Many involved teenage girls, like Mayra Cruz, whose family was reduced to asking a local community group to help distribute her photograph after police, having written her off as a runaway, dragged their feet investigating.

Some, like Ashley Brown, who was last seen walking to school on Jan. 10 in Lutz, Fla., are recent cases. Others are older, such as the case of Jason Cannon, a 2-year-old in Boise, Idaho, who disappeared from his front yard on March 16, 1983.

The difficulties caused by the absence of many older cases from the nationwide database became apparent in the Bar-Jonah case, when police started searching for other potential victims of the convicted child molester.

One frustrated FBI agent resorted to calling a newspaper reporter for help finding unsolved cases, after the bureau's own search of national records turned up only 10 in New England during the period in question.

The Courant, searching newspaper files and contacting state and local police departments, found 20 unsolved cases from the same period.

``Even the FBI's data is only going to be as good as what departments decide to report,'' said FBI Agent Stephen Kives, who spent three years in the Child Abduction Unit and now works in the bureau's Connecticut office.

``There's no mandate to make departments report their cases,'' Kives said. ``It should be an automatic thing to contact the missing children center, but a lot of times even now police departments don't know they exist.''

Missing Teenagers

Tracy Gilpin wanted a cigarette.

To satisfy her craving, the 15-year-old girl left a party in the Rocky Nook section of Kingston, Mass., and set out on foot to a nearby Cumberland Farms on Oct. 1, 1986. She never came back.

But when her family reported her disappearance, police assumed she had run away. Her family believes they did little to look for Tracy, although the police chief later defended the department, saying ``everything that could be done was done.''

``The police deemed her a runaway and wrote her off,'' Kathleen Gilpin said. ``They came to me several times and said she had been seen at the beach or the mall.''

Three weeks later, a woman walking her dog in a state park in nearby Plymouth found Tracy's body. Her skull had been crushed. An autopsy concluded she had been dead for weeks.

Time is an important factor when investigating child abductions. But in many cases involving teenagers who disappear -- particularly girls -- police squander valuable time by assuming they ran away or went off with a boyfriend.

And that does not sit well with Robert Keppel.

Keppel, an investigator with the Washington State Attorney General's office, helped conduct a 1997 national study of child abduction cases. It concluded that police must immediately investigate all missing children reports, no matter what the age or sex, or risk losing potential valuable leads.

The study showed that, among abductions that end in murder, 75 percent of the children are killed within three hours. Ninety-one percent are killed within 24 hours.

``If the police are notified, and they don't start a criminal investigation immediately, then it's shame on them,'' Keppel said.

Sometimes even when an investigation is begun, the police don't take basic investigative steps that could be critical to solving the case. Keppel's study found that in more than 10 percent of all abduction cases, police do not canvass the missing child's neighborhood for witnesses and evidence, and when they do, it is often with patrol officers inexperienced in asking the right questions.

That laxity is compounded when the victims are young teens, who account for half of all abduction cases. Because teenagers generally are more likely than smaller children to stray from home, police sometimes are quick to assume they are not in danger.

``They don't get the same priority from investigators as little children, and in these type of cases if you don't jump on them quickly, then you've lost valuable time you'll never get back,'' said Kives.

Judi Kelly knows how police can pigeonhole missing-children cases.

When her 13-year-old daughter, Lisa White, vanished from Vernon in July 1974, police assumed she ran away. Kelly heard the familiar story that she had been seen at the mall or in another city, and she says she could not convince detectives to take the case seriously.

Lisa never came home, and 26 years later Kelly still keeps the same phone number in case her daughter calls. But she long ago realized that wasn't going to happen, and that Lisa had probably been abducted -- a view now shared by Vernon police. A department spokesman said that while detectives originally deemed her runaway, they did everything they could to find her.

``They didn't give two hoots when my daughter disappeared,'' Kelly said. ``A mother knows when something bad happens to their child, and I knew deep down Lisa was never coming home.''

Unknown Suspect

When Richard Bergeron became police chief in Webster, Mass., in 1996, one of the first things he wanted to do was take a fresh look at the 1978 disappearance of Andrew Amato, a 4-year-old boy last seen playing in the woods behind his house.

Bergeron, a former detective from Quincy, Mass., decided to look at unsolved abduction cases around the state to see if there were any similarities.

What he found -- or didn't find -- surprised him.

``There just wasn't any information available from other departments that might have been worth looking at,'' Bergeron said. ``I was disappointed, because in my mind there's nothing more important than kids' cases.''

What Bergeron never discovered in his search were state police records indicating that a year before Andrew was abducted, Wayne Chapman, a suspect in the disappearances of at least two other Massachusetts boys, had been charged with abducting a 10-year-old boy in Webster -- Bergeron's own town.

Webster police did not know about Chapman until told by The Courant about the records, which are in files kept by the Massachusetts State Police cold-case squad. Sgt. Richard Nagle, the head of the squad, said it was clear from the Chapman case that police departments need to do a better job of working together on unsolved crimes.

``We need to establish procedures so that everyone is on the same page,'' Nagle said. ``It seems everyone has been lax with sharing these records.''

Lately, it is the Bar-Jonah investigation that is giving police in Webster, and across the country, a crash course in the importance of cooperation and record keeping.

Bar-Jonah was accused earlier this year of abducting and killing a 10-year-old boy in Great Falls, Mont., where he has lived since leaving Massachusetts in the early 1990s. Authorities in Great Falls found in Bar-Jonah's house a handwritten list of 27 children whom he apparently knew during his time in eastern Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Since discovery of the list -- as well as unidentified bones of a child found in Bar-Jonah's garage -- investigators have been scrambling to find any unsolved abduction cases to which he could be linked.

But detectives fear incomplete and missing records may cause them to miss a case -- like Leigh Savoie's. The call from Albert Paskell, asking about that decades-old unsolved case, was not the only one that Webster police Officer John Bolduc has fielded since news spread of the Bar-Jonah investigation.

``I've been shocked by the number of people who've called,'' Bolduc said. ``It's hard to hear them say the police aren't looking for their child anymore.''

59 Stolen Hearts

Among New England's unsolved child-abduction cases, most victims vanished from rural areas. 9 walking in the neighborhood. 7 playing in the neighborhood. 6 riding their bicycles. 6 having left home after an argument. 5 walking to a convenience store. 4 walking to or from school. 4 playing at a playground. 4 at or on their way to work. 3 in a downtown areas. 1 last seen at a friend's house. 1 at a parade. 1 sitting in a card. 8 undetermined.